The house was large and elegant. It had obviously been built long ago, but it was well cared for. The trees and bushes in the front yard were beautifully trimmed. Several of the trees were so perfectly shaped and matched that they looked like plastic imitations. One large pine cast a broad shadow on the ground. The view from here was unobstructed, but it revealed not a single house as far as the eye could see. Tengo guessed that a person would have to loathe human contact to build a home in such an inconvenient place.

Turning the knob with a clatter, Fuka-Eri walked in through the unlocked front door and signaled for Tengo to follow her. No one came out to greet them. They removed their shoes in the quiet, almost too-large front entry hall. The glossy wooden floor of the corridor felt cool against stocking feet as they walked down it to the large reception room. The windows there revealed a panoramic view of the mountains and of a river meandering far below, the sunlight reflecting on its surface. It was a marvelous view, but Tengo was in no mood to enjoy it. Fuka-Eri sat him down on a large sofa and left the room without a word. The sofa bore the smell of a distant age, but just how distant Tengo could not tell.

The reception room was almost frighteningly free of decoration. There was a low table made from a single thick plank. Nothing lay on it—no ashtray, no tablecloth. No pictures adorned the walls. No clocks, no calendars, no vases. No sideboard, no magazines, no books. The floor had an antique rug so faded that its pattern could not be discerned, and the sofa and easy chairs seemed just as old. There was nothing else, just the large, raft-like sofa on which Tengo was sitting and three matching chairs. There was a large, open-style fireplace, but it showed no signs of having contained a fire recently. For a mid-April morning, the room was downright chilly, as if the cold that had seeped in through the winter had decided to stay for a while. Many long months and years seemed to have passed since the room had made up its mind never to welcome any visitors. Fuka-Eri returned and sat down next to Tengo, still without speaking.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Fuka-Eri shut herself up in her own enigmatic world, while Tengo tried to calm himself with several quiet deep breaths. Except for the occasional distant bird cry, the room was hushed. Tengo listened to the silence, which seemed to offer several different meanings. It was not simply an absence of sound. The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself. For no reason, he looked at his watch. Raising his face, he glanced at the view outside the window, and then looked at his watch again. Hardly any time had passed. Time always passed slowly on Sunday mornings.

Ten minutes went by like this. Then suddenly, without warning, the door opened and a thinly built man entered the reception room with nervous footsteps. He was probably in his mid-sixties. He was no taller than five foot three, but his excellent posture prevented him from looking unimpressive. His back was as straight as if it had a steel rod in it, and he kept his chin pulled in smartly. His eyebrows were bushy, and he wore black, thick-framed glasses that seemed to have been made to frighten people. His movements suggested an exquisite machine with parts designed for compactness and efficiency. Tengo started to stand and introduce himself, but the man quickly signaled for him to remain seated. Tengo sat back down while the man rushed to lower himself into the facing easy chair, as if in a race with Tengo. For a while, the man simply stared at Tengo, saying nothing. His gaze was not exactly penetrating, but his eyes seemed to take in everything, narrowing and widening like a camera’s diaphragm when the photographer adjusts the aperture.

The man wore a deep green sweater over a white shirt and dark gray woolen trousers. Each piece looked as if it had been worn daily for a good ten years or more. They conformed to his body well enough, but they were also a bit threadbare. This was not a person who paid a great deal of attention to his clothes. Nor, perhaps, did he have people close by who did it for him. The thinness of his hair emphasized the rather elongated shape of his head from front to back. He had sunken cheeks and a square jaw. A plump child’s tiny lips were the one feature of his that did not quite match the others. His razor had missed a few patches on his face—or possibly it was just the way the light struck him. The mountain sunlight pouring through the windows seemed different from the sunlight Tengo was used to seeing.

“I’m sorry I made you come all this way,” the man said. He spoke with an unusually clear intonation, like someone long accustomed to public speaking—and probably about logical topics. “It’s not easy for me to leave this place, so all I could do was ask you to go to the trouble of coming here.”

Tengo said it was no trouble at all. He told the man his name and apologized for not having a business card.

“My name is Ebisuno,” the man said. “I don’t have a business card either.”

“Mr. ‘Ebisuno’?” Tengo asked.

“Everybody calls me ‘Professor.’ I don’t know why, but even my own daughter calls me ‘Professor.’ ”

“What characters do you write your name with?”

“It’s an unusual name. I hardly ever see anybody else with it. Eri, write the characters for him, will you?”

Fuka-Eri nodded, took out a kind of notebook, and slowly, painstakingly, wrote the characters for Tengo on a blank sheet with a ballpoint pen. The “Ebisu” part was the character normally used for ancient Japan’s wild northern tribes. The “no” was just the usual character for “field.” The way Fuka-Eri wrote them, the two characters could have been scratched into a brick with a nail, though they did have a certain style of their own.

“In English, my name could be translated as ‘field of savages’—perfect for a cultural anthropologist, which is what I used to be.” The Professor’s lips formed something akin to a smile, but his eyes lost none of their attentiveness. “I cut my ties with the research life a very long time ago, though. Now, I’m doing something completely different. I’m living in a whole new ‘field of savages.’ ”

To be sure, the Professor’s name was an unusual one, but Tengo found it familiar. He was fairly certain there had been a famous scholar named Ebisuno in the late sixties who had published a number of well-received books. He had no idea what the books were about, but the name, at least, remained in some remote corner of his memory. Somewhere along the way, though, he had stopped encountering it.

“I think I’ve heard your name before,” Tengo said tentatively.

“Perhaps,” the Professor said, looking off into the distance, as if speaking about someone not present. “In any case, it would have been a long time ago.”

Tengo could sense the quiet breathing of Fuka-Eri seated next to him—slow, deep breathing.

“Tengo Kawana,” the Professor said as if reading a name tag.

“That’s right,” Tengo said.

“You majored in mathematics in college, and now you teach math at a cram school in Yoyogi,” the Professor said. “But you also write fiction. That’s what Eri tells me. Is that about right?”

“Yes, it is,” Tengo said.

“You don’t look like a math teacher. You don’t look like a writer, either.”

Tengo gave him a strained smile and said, “Somebody said exactly the same thing to me the other day. It’s probably my build.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad sense,” the Professor said, pressing back the bridge of his black-framed glasses. “There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don’t fit the stereotype yet.”

“I’m honored to have you say that. I’m not a writer yet. I’m still just trying to write fiction.”

“Trying.”

“It’s still trial and error for me.”